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Lebanese food, in the office, at lunchtime

Why order pizza for a takeaway office lunch? I thought, when remitted to get lunch for a team meeting. Everyone does that. I wanted to be more interesting. Lebanese would be way more interesting.

One I had emailed my colleagues the menu, I kept getting orders for sandwiches. This worried me. I would never ever look at a menu with unusual names and flavours and order a sandwich. It was when my boss in passing referred to Lebanese food as spicy that I started to get wind of the fact that I may have misjudged my colleagues interest in unusual foods and made a faux pas. I remembered that this was a man who eats mars bars for breakfast and hates tea and coffee because he doesn’t like hot food in his mouth.

It was wisely pointed out by one colleague who could barely disguise his concern that we would need knives forks and plates, so I figured, I would not back down, I would go the extra mile and bring plastic cutlery at my own expense.

My boss had ordered chicken and rice. It started to make sense to me. I handed over the rice realising that all the rice came with vermicelli and waited to be shouted at for ordering rice with maggots.

I was getting panicky. There was a garlic labneh. I have heard it said that some people hated garlic. This wasn’t really possible was it? Worse, could it be true of the people I had just ordered this meal for? The things you don’t know about those who sit next to you every day.

In fact when I thought about it, how come I know about labneh and vermicelli. That will be Ottolenghi cook book. And while I have come across them many times since, perhaps I have taken this knowledge for granted.

Me, I was on a diet. I ordered smoked aubergine which was delicious but way more oily than I anticipated and I did not need to eat again all day.

Hmm, so what’s baklava? Asked the grad. Baklava is great I said, honey and pistachio and oily puff pastry. She took a bite and pulled a face. I was disappointed until I clocked that no one wanted to try the baklava. And it would have been wasteful to throw it away so I had to do my bit and keep all of the baklava to my self.

Judging from the clean up, I think I may not have done too badly. The only real left over casualties were labneh and vegetables.

Nice one, said my colleague with the phd, next time we will order from Beruit? I have no idea if this was irony or not.